So, the book of the month thing is running into snags. Not so much on the writing end, but for some reason we are having a godawful hell of a time getting April’s book of the month onto the blog. It all has to do with converting it into a PDF file, but since I don’t even know what that means, I sit by helplessly while my wife deals with the frustration of knowing a little bit about the problem, but not totally being able to solve it.
The next book will just be poetry, maybe the next two. Soon I will run into the other problem, actually writing a book which isn’t just a collection of previously written material.
There is one book of poetry I think will be a major, defining work, something into which I’ve put a lot of thought, but on the other hand just another one of my gimmicks. The title will be 155 Sonnets. The title is chock full of arrogance and will no doubt tick some people off, which is kind of the point. Otherwise, why sonnets at all? It’s a totally outmoded poetic form based on an outdated mode of speech. Everything’s 8 syllables nowadays. It comes much more naturally.
Another reason I like playing with Sonnets, however, is just that it is a strict form, and I feel that by sticking to a strict form and finding the possibilities within it, I can produce poetry. Same with Haiku.
But they are harder than they look. I have about 30 or so, which means I still have to write about 120 or 30, which means if I write 2 or 3 a week I could complete the project in a year. And I’m having a hard time coming out with that. I don’t know how Shakespeare did it. Filled with respect.
On the other hand, I have an idea that I want to get across and it’s too big and complicated to get across in a poem, any one poem, for it is multifaceted and I don’t even understand it myself, but it has to do with the growth and evolution of human consciousness, and the spark of intellectual curiousity and how magic, religion, science and art were, at the dawn of intelligence, not necessarily differentiated, and animal shrieks and natural bodily reactions, such as widening of eyes, raising of hands, shifting of balance gradually became words, and words became oral history, and then somebody came along and invented an alphabet and things got written down and their were records and history and then eventually, thank his noodly appendages, fiction and gradually things began to solidify, stories became legends, then fairy tales, then a part of the human psyche, then somebody invented the printing press, then somebody invented the computer and now we have a swiftly developing universe which is entirely imaginary, or maybe something between imaginary and real, the noosphere, and we need to build a bridge out to it, find some kind of transition to it.
So, 120 or 30 sonnets should just about cover it.
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